​Nekroz have been a fan favorite since 2015, when several their cards (including their Strategist) found themselves on the restricted list. Shurit is still banned, but with the help of some new cards from Soul Fusion, can the deck still be competitive? Let’s find out!

The first cards we’re going to look at are the Impcantations. They all have two effects – you can reveal a Ritual card (two need a monster, two need a spell) from your hand to summon them from your hand, and when you do that they pull a different Impcantation out of your deck. Their other effect triggers when they’re summoned from the deck to add a Ritual Monster or Spell from your deck or graveyard to your hand. This means if you have one in your hand that you can summon, it turns into two monsters on the field and just about any card from your deck, which is clearly a ton of utility for a card we can play 12 of. Combined with the utility of the Nekroz cards themselves, we have a consistent engine to access the cards we will need.

The obvious benefit of playing these cards is the searching effect, but we can also take advantage of the two monsters summoned by the other effect. We can tribute them for Valkyrus to draw more cards, but we can also tribute them to summon Zaborg the Mega Monarch! Zaborg’s effect will destroy itself when it’s summoned, and then we select and send 8 cards from each player’s Extra Deck to the grave. We can send our opponents’ best cards out of their Extra Deck (Sky Striker can’t do much without any of their Link monsters), but we can send even better cards out of our own Extra Deck. Herald of the Arc Light, PSY-Framelord Omega, and Toadally Awesome give us more resources to work with, while Elder Entity N’tss takes away cards from our opponent. The Impcantations ensure we’ll always have two monsters to tribute for Zaborg when we draw it, and sending 8 cards from our Extra Deck to the graveyard will almost always be enough to win us the game.​Finally, Nekroz cards are as powerful as ever thanks to the game-breaking effects of Trishula and Unicore. Even without Shurit, the engine still has a lot of the consistency it used to (plus 3 copies of Preparation of Rites). Let’s look at the decklist:

We’ve already talked about how powerful these cards are, but even if they weren’t it would be difficult to cut any of these. Our best hands will have two different Impcantations so that we can summon the two we don’t draw from our deck, which means we actually want to draw the ones with the worst secondary effects. However, we want to max out on the best ones as well so that they’re always in our deck to be summoned.

3 Zaborg the Mega Monarch3 Manju of the Ten Thousand Hands2 Senju of the Thousand Hands

In addition to Zaborg, these other Normal Summons will make the deck more consistent and give us something to do when we don’t draw Zaborg. One Senju is excluded to make space for other cards and to avoid drawing too many Normal Summons in the same opening hand.

Our Nekroz lineup is mostly self-explanatory with a few twists. Brionac, Unicore and Clausolas are the best ways for us to access the rest of our engine, so we want to play as many copies of each as we can. Gungnir, Valkyrus, and Trishula are all searchable and bad in multiples so normally we would only play one of each. However, it’s important that we’re able to summon Trishula and Valkyrus while we have another one in hand to avoid dying and to negate Widow Anchor. All the Ritual Spells are here except for Cycle, which is a lot worse without Shurit or any of the Nekroz Effect monsters.

3 Preparation of Rites2 Extra Foolish Burial

Preparation of Rites has always been one of Nekroz’s most powerful cards, and now that it’s back at 3 it’ll help make our deck even stronger. Another new card from Soul Fusion, Extra Foolish Burial, will also help us out – by paying half our Life Points we can send Herald of the Arc Light to the graveyard, which will then search any Ritual card from our deck. Unlike Preparation of Rites, Extra Foolish Burial is limited to one copy per turn, which is why there’s only 2 in the deck.

Since the Impcantations prevent us from summoning from the Extra Deck, the Link monsters in this deck are limited to only the most powerful generic Links we could want. Instead, most of our space is dedicated to cards we can send with Zaborg like Herald, Toadally Awesome and N’tss, as well as some high-level Synchros we can send with Nekroz Kaleidoscope.​Nekroz is one of many decks getting support in the newest set. What are you looking forward to in Soul Fusion? Let us know, and make sure to like our ARG PRO Yugioh Team Facebook page to find all our other articles. Until next time, Play Hard or Go Home!

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By VINNIE SILVERMAN​

Vinnie Silverman has been playing Yu-Gi-Oh! at a competitive level for 8 years and is always on the forefront of new deck building strategies. When he's not playing at locals with his latest brew, he studies Chemistry at Carnegie Mellon University and learns other TCGs.

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